When required to justify their evaluations, politicians rely more on prior political attitudes and less on policy information; they are more immune to the correction of biases than the public

Motivated reasoning and policy information: politicians are more resistant to debiasing interventions than the general public. Julian Christensen, Donald P Moynihan. Behavioural Public Policy, November 24 2020. https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2020.50

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1331170671959928833

Abstract: A growing body of evidence shows that politicians use motivated reasoning to fit evidence with prior beliefs. In this, they are not unlike other people. We use survey experiments to reaffirm prior work showing that politicians, like the public they represent, engage in motivated reasoning. However, we also show that politicians are more resistant to debiasing interventions than others. When required to justify their evaluations, politicians rely more on prior political attitudes and less on policy information, increasing the probability of erroneous decisions. The results raise the troubling implication that the specialized role of elected officials makes them more immune to the correction of biases, and in this way less representative of the voters they serve when they process policy information.

Discussion and exploratory analysis

The motivation to defend political attitudes is powerful, leading many to auto-accept politically congenial information while disregarding information that challenges existing views about the world. While lending some support to the potential to debias citizens, we find that politicians become more inclined to engage in politically motivated reasoning when required to justify their evaluations.

Why might politicians differ from citizens in their reactions to our experiment's justification requirement? While our study was not designed to offer causal evidence to answer this question, we can draw on our data to explore which possible explanations are more or less likely. One possibility is that personal characteristics, such as being more politically engaged (Taber & Lodge, Reference Taber and Lodge2006), make politicians more resistant towards debiasing interventions, meaning that the politician–citizen differences are due to self-selection. As a proxy for such personal characteristics, we can test the role of political interest, which was measured in the general public survey and is ‘a standard measure of psychological engagement in politics’ (Brady et al., Reference Brady, Verba and Schlozman1995). If the bias-strengthening effects of justification requirements among politicians are driven by self-selection based on political engagement, similar effects would be expected among the group of people who are most politically interested. However, this is not the case for our sample (see the regression analysis in Supplementary Material S4). The respondents who are most interested in politics, and who should therefore, according to the explanation above, be expected to react most like politicians, are the ones who drive the overall debiasing effect on non-politicians’ reasoning, meaning that they are the ones who behave least like politicians in reaction to justification requirements. Thus, our data suggest that explanations other than self-selection must be considered.

Another possibility is that the politician's role changes how people respond to justification requirements. Some studies show that professional roles lead certain groups to make unbiased professional judgments (Kahan, Reference Kahan2016b). For instance, relative to the public, judges and lawyers appear to be less biased when asked to evaluate judicial information, implying that legal training, but possibly also the demands of their job, condition legal professionals to better resist politically biased processing of information (Kahan et al., Reference Kahan, Hoffman, Evans, Devins, Lucci and Cheng2016). Like judges and lawyers, we may consider a politician to be a professional actor who is regularly asked to make judgments based on decision-relevant information. However, where a judicial professional is expected to set aside political attitudes and partisan identities, it is a politician's job to be a partisan (Andeweg, Reference Andeweg1997) and to avoid punishment from an external audience that values credible commitments (Tomz, Reference Tomz2007). As discussed in relation to H2 and H3, politicians are expected to be consistent in their political views and to defend the policy preferences upon which they have been elected. Politicians are trained to treat inconsistency as a sign of weakness, the trademark of a flip-flopper who will be penalized by voters and other political stakeholders (Tomz, Reference Tomz2007). Thus, their professional role gives politicians an incentive to treat justification requirements not as an opportunity to examine and nuance their own reasoning, but to construct arguments in favor of preselected conclusions.

While our experiments were not designed to test effects of role differences between politicians and the public, we can compare the responses of recently elected politicians with those of more experienced colleagues. If the bias-strengthening effect of justification requirements is due to politician-specific norms, we would expect the effect to be stronger among those who have been more exposed to those norms over time. Table 3 divides politicians between those elected in the previous year (39% of our sample) and the rest of our sample who had all been in office for 5 years or more. Consistent with the role-based explanation, Table 3 shows the bias-strengthening effect to be driven by experienced politicians. The justification requirement has no effect on the recently elected politicians in model 1, but has significant bias-strengthening effects on the experienced politicians in model 2.

Table 3. Recently elected versus experienced politicians (logistic regression analysis with standard errors in parentheses).

Note: Politicians are coded as ‘recently elected’ if the most recent election (in November 2013, 1 year before our data collection) was the first election where they were elected and ‘experienced’ if they were elected before the 2013 election. The dependent variable measures whether respondents identify the supplier with the highest satisfaction rate as being the one that performs the best.

^†p < 0.1, *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001; two-sided significance tests.

To cast further light on the reasoning strategies of our respondents, we coded the qualitative content of the written justifications (for the coding scheme and analyses, see Supplementary Material S6). The results of our qualitative content analyses provide additional evidence of our results being driven by experienced politicians having learned strategies to confront attitude-uncongenial information as an expert motivated reasoner. Thus, whereas the qualitative content of the justifications provided by non-politicians and recently elected politicians was more or less unaffected by the attitude-congeniality of the experiments’ information, experienced politicians more often adapted their arguments depending on the information at hand. Specifically, as reported in the supplementary material's Tables S6ca and S6cb, the experienced politicians tended to base their justifications on the tables’ data (i.e., they referred to parent satisfaction) when this was attitude-congenial. However, Table S6ce shows that when the data were uncongenial, the experienced politicians more often based their justifications on specific conditions of local government (this could be equity considerations, expectations regarding the education of staff, etc.). Because these are explorative analyses of data, which were not collected for the purpose of testing the effects of roles, caution is needed when evaluating the results. However, the results are consistent with the idea that, over time, through their job, politicians learn how to defend their attitudes and beliefs ‘like a politician’ when faced with attitude-uncongenial information.